In 2022, five working groups of the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform collaborated on a diverse range of topics related to better sharing of cultural heritage. In this blog post, we highlight their incredible contribution to the open culture community.

Digital Community Heritage

Led by Bettina Fabos and Mariana Ziku, the Digital Community Heritage Working Group focused on international community-related heritage initiatives in the context of open access and inclusive digital transformation. The collaborative research carried out in the course of a year aimed to map and analyze the openness spectrum and typology of digital community heritage initiatives, which included collecting international cases, performing data analysis and visualization, providing insights into patterns and trends, and identifying good practices and common challenges in the field. The output of this research includes the publication of a data-driven multilingual study discussing digital community heritage and open-access, and a published machine readable dataset of 27 international digital community heritage initiatives with information structured into several categories. Read a summary of the study on CC’s Medium in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Swahili. You can find out more about the WG on their PubPub website.
Access the dataset and data visualizations folder.

Watch the webinar recording for an overview of the project and its outputs.

Traditional Knowledge and Copyright Intersections

Led by Connor Benedict and Alhassan Mohammed Awal, the Traditional Knowledge and Copyright Intersections Working Group was created on the acknowledgement that the needs and circumstances of groups and resources that fall under the broad category of indigenous knowledge are both varied and specific. To determine the value and applicability of CC licenses and CC principles to these varied groups requires knowledge and understanding that only the members of those groups hold. The WG sought to gain a better sense of the important issues pertaining to the relationship between traditional knowledge, groups, and resources and the CC licenses and CC principles and copyright. The output of the WG includes a webinar series featuring three speakers with lived experience, as well as experts who have worked with impacted groups, as well as an article on CC’s Medium which includes a summary and recordings of the webinars.

Watch the webinar recording for an overview of the project and its outputs.

Archiving New and Emergent Media 

Led by Connor Benedict and Abdul Dube, the working group was created based on the recognition that the majority of open GLAM work had been focused on big institutions and traditional heritage, with little support and knowledge available for smaller organizations and their contemporary archiving and documenting needs. The working group believed that traditional and larger heritage institutions could significantly benefit from collaborating with smaller organizations and private collections. In the future digital culture and the growing digitization of cultural heritage, one of the main challenges would be the vast amount of heritage material in the digital realm, which would be unmanageable for big institutions without cooperation from other players in the field of digital cultural heritage. The group’s goals were to (1) highlight the archiving practices, innovations, and needs of a variety of contemporary organizations and (2) create a resource for anyone interested in contemporary archiving to explore and gain knowledge from.

A series of interviews with cultural organizations was conducted by the working group, and a co-created zine was produced, which is available for download and will be available at CC events in 2023. More information about the group’s work can be found on Medium.

Watch the webinar recording for an overview of the project and its outputs.

Public domain collections referenced by CC BY to designate collections holders

Led by Deborah De Angelis and Tomoaki Watanabe, this Working Group discussed a particular use of CC licenses, typically a CC BY license by cultural heritage institutions (CHIs). In digital archives, we sometimes see collections provided under a CC BY license, or other CC licenses,even when the original work is in the public domain, and the digitization does not generate any new copyright. The provider of such work, typically a CHI, is presumably not a copyright holder, and their license is technically invalid. The working group discussed causes, a range of potential interventions, and pros and cons of the interventions. They recommended Creative Commons and other similar entities the following: 1) change the content of the CC0 pages to facilitate communication of CHIs to make a legally non-binding, courtesy request to receive credit, 2) not develop a new legal tool which obligates attribution to CHIs, and 3) promote giving credits to CHIs. Their output includes 1) a brief report, 2) illustrated version of the report’s highlights (available from the above-mentioned report), and 3) a webinar. 

Watch the webinar recording for an overview of the project and its outputs.

Open GLAM Resources

Led by Revekka Kefalea and Jesse Carson, this working group aimed to develop practical resources for the open culture / open GLAM sector. As resources dealing with copyright, open licensing, and GLAMs proliferate in the form of academic and gray literature, reports, magazine articles, blogs, etc., it becomes increasingly important to ensure that they are discoverable and accessible. Gathering literature together in the form of a bibliography that can be added to by the global community is one way to encourage the sharing and use of these resources. Similarly, as terms and concepts related to open licensing and GLAMs grow in usage, there is value in gathering definitions and establishing relationships between concepts, and facilitating their translation into many languages. For these reasons, they considered it important to start collecting information about these resources, and making them easily discoverable — not only for those already working, researching, and advocating in the field, but also for newcomers interested in exploring and contributing to the Open Culture/GLAM world. Similarly, they thought it was important to gather working definitions and descriptions of terms relevant to Open Culture/GLAM, establish relationships between those concepts, and facilitate their translation into other languages. With these two goals in mind, they decided to co-create a bibliography to capture Open Culture/GLAM literature, and a glossary to capture Open Culture/GLAM terminology. You can read more about the group’s work in their article on CC’s Medium. The group’s resources can be found as follows: 

1. Open Culture/GLAM Resources Zotero Group Library: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4612906/open_culture__glam_resources/library 
2. Open Culture/GLAM Resources Zotero Group: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4612906/open_culture__glam_resources
3. Zotero Library – “How to contribute” guide on Meta-Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Culture/GLAM_Glossary/Zotero_Library 
4. Open Culture/GLAM Glossary Meta-Wiki page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Culture/GLAM_Glossary 

Watch the webinar recording for an overview of the project and its outputs.

Do you also want to get involved? Don’t hesitate!

• Become a member of the CC Open Culture Platform
• Sign up to the CC Open Culture mailing list
• Join the #cc-openglam Slack channel
• Participate in CC Open Culture Platform calls — they are announced in the Slack channel and on the mailing list